Julien Klaer

~/about

experience

cloud & infracodedelivery & opspeoplenumbers[expand all]

1. 2022-08 → nowcurrentLuxembourg

   Site Reliability Engineer @ Tadaweb

   terraformkubernetescluster-apigolangargocdobservabilitygitlab-ci

   Tadaweb builds an OSINT platform whose mission is to make the world a safer place by empowering the human mind with the right information at the right time.

   details · 10 points

   • build and improve the platform's core infrastructure (VPCs, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, image registries and more) with Terraform on GCP, Azure and AWS
   • deploy and operate ~15 Kubernetes clusters day to day, provisioned with Cluster API (self-managed) or Terraform (managed, e.g. GKE)
   • maintain custom node images built with Packer, for immutable infrastructure and hardened security and compliance
   • collect metrics, traces and logs to define SLIs and write meaningful SLOs (Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Loki, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo/Jaeger, Thanos)
   • set up smart alerts on those metrics to react quickly when a component fails, and write post-mortems covering what happened, how it was fixed and how to prevent it from happening again
   • configure standalone VMs outside the main platform with Ansible
   • run continuous deployment with a GitOps model on Argo CD
   • maintain a library of GitLab CI templates shared across development teams to standardise image building (Kaniko, Buildah), scanning (Trivy, Grype), signing (Cosign) and binary authorisation (Kyverno)
   • write Go tools to solve platform challenges: a Terraform provider, CLIs, and services that talk directly to the Kubernetes API
   • write Python glue tools that chain the steps of a process together (e.g. Terraform and Ansible)
2. 2020-09 → 2022-08Luxembourg

   Head of Software Engineers @ Next Gate Tech

   gcpterraformibm-cloudpythonmanagement

   Next Gate Tech is a FinTech company providing SaaS solutions to the asset management industry. I joined as a Google Cloud Architect, then took over as head of the software engineering team. Most of our projects were written in Python.

   details · 10 points

   • defined and maintained the best practices for using Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Firestore/Datastore, Cloud Operations)
   • managed GCP costs through alerts and reports
   • led the full migration of the company's information system to Google Workspace, then ran it with strong security practices (password policy, 2FA, apps, users and groups)
   • administered the company domain: DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC
   • developed and maintained the company's first product in Python 3.7: scalable, cost-efficient and reliable data pipelines
   • built NGX, a new cloud-agnostic version of the product in Python 3.9, and deployed it to IBM Cloud for a client
   • managed part of the NGX project using agile methods
   • promoted the DevOps philosophy: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Cloud Build
   • reviewed security policies with the cybersecurity engineer and wrote availability procedures following SRE practices (BCP, DRP, …)
   • managed all of the company's software engineers
3. 2017-02 → 2020-09Luxembourg

   Team Leader · Consultant Software Engineer · Trainer @ SFEIR

   kubernetesdockertrainingleadership

   I joined as a full-stack engineer specialising in back-end, DevOps and cloud. I soon took on more: coaching colleagues placed at different clients, training, recruiting, and giving talks on trending topics (IoT, Go, …).

   roles · team-lead, trainer, recruiter

   team-lead

   • coached and managed a team of 10 people, following each colleague's career and assignments
   • met clients to gauge their satisfaction with our work
   • ran year-end reviews covering career plans and salary packages

   trainer

   • created training materials (slides, exercises), including the Docker and Kubernetes courses
   • gave beginner and advanced training courses and talks, both internally and for clients such as the Luxembourg Chamber of Deputies and the CSSF
   • delivered complete, tailor-made training sessions for clients such as Alten in Switzerland

   recruiter

   • helped talent managers recruit through PlayOffs, a series of three live-coding tests on algorithms, languages and frameworks that assess both technical and soft skills

   missions/

   • 2020-03 → 2020-09Consultant DevOps Engineer @ RBC Investor & Treasury Servicesopenshiftpcfci-cd

     I helped developers deliver more business value through tooling, support and migrations to modern platforms such as OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and provided CI/CD, workflow pipelines and server provisioning as a service.

   • 2020-01 → 2020-02Consultant Cloud Architect @ SFEIR clientgkespring-bootangularcloud-build

     A short mission helping colleagues migrate a client from AWS to Google Cloud, with their workload running on fully managed GKE.

   • 2018-10 → 2020-03Consultant DevOps Engineer · Java Developer @ ING Luxembourgjavajenkinsansibleelk

     ING entrusted me with creating an Ops unit so that teams could manage the releases and incidents of their own applications. The initiative started in the Daily Banking & Lending tribe and then spread bank-wide. In parallel, I worked on a major overhaul of payment processing.

     • set up a guild to spread DevOps culture within ING, and championed the model and its strategy
     • rolled out Jenkins for packaging, Ansible for infrastructure as code, and ELK for log aggregation and service health monitoring
     • contributed to implementing the European PSD2 directive
     • migrated the SWIFT payment platform to the ING Group platform, which processes thousands of payments a day
   • 2017-05 → 2018-10Consultant Fullstack Developer @ Société Générale Bank & Trustspring-bootangulargroovydocker

     I migrated a legacy trading application built with Java and Qt Jambi, one financial product at a time, to Spring Boot 2 microservices and Angular 6 micro-frontends.

     • wrote a Groovy shared library for Jenkins pipelines as code, with deployments through XL Deploy
     • built a complete CI/CD pipeline for Angular component libraries at a time when no native solution existed
     • advised the architecture team on Docker, with proofs of concept including Spring Cloud integration
   • 2017-02 → 2017-05Consultant Fullstack Developer @ Legitech

     Legitech builds a document management platform that makes legislation easier to read for jurists and lawyers. I built the desktop publishing application that consolidates legal texts and exports them in a format the publisher can print as books.

4. 2016-09 → 2017-02Luxembourg

   Analyst Programmer @ PwC Luxembourg

   javamaintenance

   In the application maintenance team, I restored the stability of Java applications in production and modernised them.

   details · 2 points

   • ensured the quality and availability of many applications, and analysed and fixed day-to-day issues
   • set up new tools to make maintenance easier
5. 2014-07 → 2016-09Metz

   System Administrator @ efluid SAS

   groovyjenkinsdockergit

   As a junior system administrator and integrator in the build and release team, I automated nightly builds, continuous integration, packaging and deployment.

   details · 3 points

   • managed application releases and kept CI and deployed applications healthy across dev, test and QA environments
   • improved tooling for the DevOps strategy (Docker, Jenkins pipelines, Groovy)
   • trained people on Git

certifications

• 2023Certified Kubernetes Administrator · CNCF
• 2019Certified Kubernetes Administrator · CNCF
• 2018Professional Cloud Architect · Google Cloud

education

• 2014Degree in Computer Science · Université de Lorraine, Metz
• 2012University Diploma of Technology (DUT) · Université de Lorraine, Metz
• 2010Baccalaureate, science track · Lycée Condorcet, Schoeneck